Single, in her 30s, working as a writer in New York City, Kristin Kimball was living life as an adventure but was also beginning to feel a sense of longing for a family and for home. When she interviewed a dynamic young farmer, the sparks between them led Kimball to abandon the city for his farm near Lake Champlain. This book is the unsentimental yet vivid chronicle of their first year together on Essex Farm, from the cold North Country winter through the following harvest seasonócomplete with their wedding in the loft of the barn. "As much as you transform the land by farming," she writes, "farming transforms you." Kimball and her husband had a plan: to grow everything needed to feed a community, and provide it for cooperative members. It was an ambitious idea, a bit romantic, and it worked. Kimball's descriptions of landscape, food, cooking, and marriage are irresistible. She discovers the wrenching pleasures of physical work, learns that good food is at the center of a good life, falls deeply in love, and finally finds the engagement and commitment she craved.

"A wonderfully told tale of one of the most interesting farms in the country. If you want to understand the heart and soul of the new/old movement towards local food, this is the book you need. It's the voice of what comes next in this land, of the generation unleashed by Wendell Berry to do something really grand."óBill McKibben